TV Sunday: The Good Wife not just good, but glorious (with video)

Julianna Margulies show has has raised the emotional stakes

Never mind the unexpected death of a major character — without warning, with no pre-show hype or even a hint that it was going to happen.

Never mind the noteworthy performances by what might just be TV’s most overlooked ensemble cast.

The Good Wife has taken a tired TV trope — the courtroom drama — and turned it into something quite remarkable.

But lately it’s upped the emotional stakes. No matter how well you think you know the characters, it’s impossible to predict what will happen next.

Christine Baranski as Diane Lockhart in The Good Wife

And yet, when it happens, it feels organic, true to the story and true to life, not the product of a TV scriptwriter trying to be clever.

The Good Wife picks up Sunday with Alicia Florrick (Julianna Margulies) and Diane Lockhart (Christine Baranski) mulling over whether to merge their firms in the wake of Will Gardner’s death.

Reality intrudes, though, when But they find themselves on opposite sides of a messy divorce suit.

Jason O’Mara appears as one of the clients, and Tony Award-winning singer Donna Murphy plays the presiding judge, Alice Adelson, in an episode directed by the noted feature film producer and director Griffin Dunne.

The Good Wife does everything with class.

The Good Wife airs Sunday on Global/CBS

Archie Panjabi, left, and Christine Baranski

Also Watch
Mad Men is likely to be the weekend’s major post-show talking point, in part because it’s been nearly a year since it was last on, and in part because hardly anyone knows what’s likely to happen next.

Except that at some point Roger Sterling (John Slattery) will pour himself a glass of Scotch and make a lewd comment, Peggy Olson (Elisabeth Moss) will fret about how her latest idea for an ad campaign will go over with the boys, and Don Draper (Jon Hamm) will ask himself — again — who he is, why he’s here and why his daughter is being so (gosh-darn) difficult. Again. (Sunday, AMC)

National TV columnist for Postmedia News Network.
Two solitudes:
“My dream is to have a bank of TVs where all the different channels are on at the same time and I can be monitoring them,” the social... read more critic Camille Paglia told Wired magazine, back in the day, before Big Brother and before Survivor. “I love the tabloid stuff. The trashier the program is, the more I feel it’s TV.”
And then there’s this, from Gilligan’s Island creator Sherwood Schwartz: “There’s a lot of underlying philosophy to the characters on Gilligan’s Island. They’re really a metaphor for the nations of the world, and their purpose was to show how nations have to get along together . . . or cease to exist.”
There you have it, then. The trashier a program is, the more it’s like TV. Or, if you prefer, TV is a metaphor for the nations of the world, and Gilligan’s Island was really a message about why we don’t all get along.
That’s where I come in.
My first TV memory was of being menaced by a Dalek on Doctor Who — the original, scratchy, black-and-white Who.
My more recent TV memories include the Sopranos finale; 9/11; Elvis Costello’s first appearance (and temporary banishment) on Saturday Night Live; what was really inside the Erlenmeyer flask in The X-Files; Law & Order (the original, and those iconic chimes); glued to the set at 3am local time during the 2003 war in Iraq — TV’s first real-time war —and Bart Simpson scrawling on the chalkboard in The Simpsons’ opening credits: “I Must Not Write All Over the Walls.”
Other Bart-isms, as seen on that TV chalkboard over the years: “I Will Never Win an Emmy,” “I No Longer Want My MTV,” and, pointedly — if a little hopefully — “Network TV is Not Dead.”
I was there to witness "the new dawn of the sitcom" in the mid-1990s, followed — inevitably — by the glut of terrible sitcoms in the early naughts, a glut that led, directly and indirectly, to the rise of reality TV.
There’s been a lot to talk about — good, bad and indifferent — about TV over the years.
That’s where you, and this space, come in. Read on. Enjoy, feel free to agree, disagree and dispute whenever you want. TV may be ugly at times, but it's a mirror of democracy in action. A funhouse mirror at times, a sober reflection at others.View author's profile